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By: Fern Sidman
In the months following the atrocities of October 7, Spain—and Barcelona in particular—has undergone a disturbing metamorphosis, one that has startled Jewish communities across Europe and reverberated through diplomatic corridors far beyond the Iberian Peninsula. A city long celebrated for its cosmopolitan openness, architectural grandeur, and cultural pluralism has found itself at the epicenter of a wave of hostility that transcends legitimate political dissent and veers unmistakably into the territory of resurgent antisemitism. What has unfolded since that autumn day is not merely a succession of isolated incidents, but the emergence of a political and social climate in which animus toward Israel has bled, with alarming frequency, into aggression toward Jews as Jews.
The transformation has been as sudden as it has been unsettling. In Barcelona, public discourse has been increasingly suffused with rhetoric that frames Israel not as a controversial state actor but as a pariah entity to be symbolically erased, economically isolated, and culturally delegitimized. This atmosphere has not been confined to the margins. On the contrary, it has been catalyzed and amplified by official decisions taken by municipal and national authorities, decisions that have lent institutional imprimatur to sentiments that, in previous eras, might have been relegated to the fringes of protest culture.
Among the most striking of these gestures was Barcelona’s declaration of “Palestine” as its symbolic eleventh district, a move that went beyond symbolic solidarity to include the allocation of public funds to UNRWA, an organization that has been widely criticized for deep infiltration by Hamas operatives. For many in the Jewish community, the decision felt less like a humanitarian overture and more like a municipal endorsement of a narrative that blurs the line between advocacy for Palestinian welfare and tacit alignment with extremist actors. The symbolism was compounded by the city’s organization of a massive “concert for Palestine,” during which Israel was erased from a projected map of the region.
At the event’s emotional crescendo, the son of Marwan Barghouti—a convicted terrorist responsible for the murder of civilians—was invited onto the stage to call for his father’s release, greeted by cheers from thousands. The spectacle, in its choreography and rhetoric, conveyed not merely criticism of Israeli policy but a valorization of figures associated with lethal violence against Jews.
Barcelona’s universities, historically bastions of intellectual inquiry and debate, have not been immune to this climate. The University of Barcelona’s launch of “Facultat 18,” a project explicitly designed to raise and transfer funds to UNRWA, further entrenched the perception that academic institutions were becoming conduits for politicized activism with scant regard for the complex realities of the organizations they were endorsing. For Jewish students and scholars, the initiative symbolized a narrowing of the discursive space in which nuanced or dissenting perspectives could be safely articulated. It also reinforced the sense that the city’s educational elite was participating in the same moral economy that had begun to dominate municipal politics.
Beyond these high-profile gestures, the everyday texture of life in Barcelona has been increasingly marred by a proliferation of antisemitic graffiti. Over the past two years, hateful slogans and imagery have appeared in hundreds of locations, transforming walls, doorways, and public squares into canvases of intimidation. The desecration of a Jewish cemetery, emboldened by the ambient rhetoric of hostility, marked a particularly chilling escalation. Cemeteries, repositories of memory and sanctity, are often the first sites targeted when hatred seeks to announce its permanence.
The smashing of headstones at the Les Corts Jewish Cemetery in January, which Israel’s Foreign Ministry linked to the broader anti-Israel campaign of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s government, reverberated as a symbolic assault on the dignity of the dead and the security of the living.
The response from Spanish Jewish organizations was measured but unmistakably anguished. The Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain and the Jewish Community of Barcelona condemned the vandalism in the strongest possible terms, framing it as part of an ongoing wave of hostility toward Jews. While these organizations stopped short of directly attributing responsibility to the government, their statements conveyed a palpable sense of vulnerability, an acknowledgment that the social environment had deteriorated to the point where such acts could no longer be dismissed as aberrations.
The hostility has not been confined to symbolic or rhetorical domains. Concrete actions have begun to constrict the civic and economic space available to Jews and Israelis in Spain. A new royal decree “against the genocide in Gaza” led Spanish bank Sabadell to freeze bank accounts, a move that sent shockwaves through the business community and raised questions about the potential weaponization of financial institutions in service of political agendas. Around two thousand pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered outside the hotel housing Hapoel Jerusalem’s basketball team in Barcelona, harassing and effectively hunting the players in a display of mob intimidation that forced authorities to acknowledge their inability to guarantee safety. A Maccabi Tel Aviv game was held in the city without spectators for the same reason, a stark testament to the erosion of basic security assurances.
Perhaps most disquieting was the emergence of an anonymous online project, Barcelonaz, which published a map identifying Jewish-owned businesses across Catalonia. The creation of such a registry evokes historical precedents that Europe, in its postwar moral reckoning, had vowed never to repeat. Even if the project’s authors cloaked their motives in the language of activism, the act of singling out Jewish enterprises for public identification carries an unmistakable resonance with darker chapters of European history. The targeting of commerce, a sphere in which Jews have long been both participants and scapegoats, underscores the extent to which contemporary anti-Israel activism in Barcelona has slipped into patterns of collective stigmatization.
The climate has grown so fraught that Jewish institutions are now urging universities abroad to suspend exchange programs with Barcelona, a measure that would have been unthinkable in a city once prized as a hub of intercultural exchange. Such calls reflect a grim calculus: that engagement, in the current environment, may expose Jewish students to hostility that institutions are either unwilling or unable to confront. The withdrawal of Spain from Eurovision to avoid sharing a stage with a Jewish artist further illustrates how cultural diplomacy itself has become entangled in the politics of exclusion.
The reverberations of Spain’s posture have not been confined to Europe. In Washington, concern has been mounting that Spain’s recent legislative measures amount to formal economic discrimination against a close American ally. In December 2025, a coalition of Republican lawmakers, led by Congresswoman Claudia Tenney, called on the U.S. Treasury Department to review Spain’s actions under Section 999 of the Internal Revenue Code, which governs American responses to foreign participation in unsanctioned international boycotts.
The letter, signed by seventeen members of Congress, reflects anxiety that Spain’s prohibition of arms trade with Israel and its ban on advertising products originating from Judea and Samaria align with the objectives of the global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. At stake, the lawmakers argued, is not only the U.S.–Israel relationship but the integrity of long-standing American laws designed to shield U.S. companies from being compelled to comply with foreign boycotts that Washington does not endorse.
The measures enacted by Spain in October represent a qualitative escalation beyond symbolic condemnation. By targeting arms trade and commercial advertising, Madrid has moved into the realm of concrete economic sanctions, a posture that carries implications for multinational corporations and bilateral relations alike. The legal and political status of the territories in question remains contested internationally, yet the unilateral nature of Spain’s restrictions has been interpreted by critics as a form of economic coercion that risks entangling U.S. firms in foreign policy disputes that conflict with Washington’s own positions.
Israel’s acting ambassador to Spain, Dana Erlich, has articulated these concerns with growing urgency. In an interview with Israel’s Channel 12, she accused Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s government of fueling antisemitism through its aggressive anti-Israel rhetoric and punitive policy measures. Erlich’s remarks underscore the extent to which the Gaza war has reshaped Spain’s posture toward Israel, and how that shift has, in her estimation, translated into a hostile environment for Spain’s Jewish community. She arrived in Madrid, she said, without illusions about the governing coalition’s stance, yet with a belief that dialogue remained possible. That hope, she suggested, has been repeatedly undermined by what she described as a systematic campaign to marginalize Israel on the global stage.
The Spanish government, for its part, has framed its actions as principled opposition to what it characterizes as Israeli misconduct in Gaza. Yet the conflation of geopolitical critique with domestic policy measures that disproportionately affect Jewish individuals and institutions has generated a moral hazard. When state rhetoric adopts absolutist language, it can legitimize a spectrum of social behaviors that range from verbal abuse to physical vandalism. The desecration of cemeteries, the mapping of Jewish businesses, and the harassment of visiting athletes do not emerge in a vacuum; they are nourished by a public discourse that renders Jews, collectively, as proxies for a distant conflict.
Barcelona’s predicament thus raises broader questions about the responsibilities of democratic societies in an era of polarized geopolitics. Criticism of state policy, even sharp criticism, is a legitimate component of democratic debate. Yet when such criticism is articulated through symbolic erasure, cultural boycotts, and economic sanctions that disproportionately stigmatize an ethnic or religious minority, the boundary between political dissent and collective vilification becomes perilously thin.
Europe’s post-Holocaust commitment to safeguarding Jewish life was predicated on the recognition that antisemitism often masquerades as moral critique before revealing its more virulent forms.
The situation in Barcelona, with its convergence of official policy, cultural activism, and grassroots hostility, serves as a cautionary tableau. It illustrates how swiftly a city’s moral self-conception can be unsettled when global conflicts are refracted through local politics without the ballast of historical memory. The appeals by Jewish institutions to suspend academic exchanges are not merely defensive gestures; they are signals of a profound rupture in the trust that once undergirded Barcelona’s reputation as a safe haven for pluralism.
Whether Spain will recalibrate its course remains an open question. The international scrutiny prompted by Washington’s legal inquiries, the diplomatic rebukes from Jerusalem, and the quiet exodus of Jewish engagement from Catalan institutions may yet compel a reexamination of policies that have, intentionally or not, contributed to an atmosphere of exclusion.
What is clear is that the events since October 7 have left an indelible mark on Barcelona’s civic fabric. A city that once prided itself on its capacity to absorb difference now stands at a crossroads, confronted with the urgent task of disentangling legitimate political advocacy from the age-old poison of antisemitism.
The world’s beloved “Palestinians”:
PUTTING WEAPONS INTO HANDS OF CHILDREN IN THEIR SUMMER CAMPS, TEACHING THEM TO KILL JEWS IS CHILD ABUSE. WHERE ARE YOUR VOICES RAISED AGAINST THIS? SINCE 2015 I HAVE ASKED THE JEWISH COMMUNITY TO FUND FULL PAGE ADS, HUGE BILL BOARDS OUTING THEIR JEW HATE AS EXPOSED BY PALWATCH…ALL ON DEAF JEWISH EARS. NOW WE SEE THE RESULTS. WE ARE HUNTED AS OPPRESSORS WHILE THESE ARABS ARE NOW THE VICTIMS. WHEN WILL WE BECOME PRO-ACTIVE VS. REACTIVE?????GINETTE WEINER
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Palestinian children at a “summer camp” in the Gaza Strip, being trained in weapons-use, so they can kill Jews and become martyrs (photo: Hamas)
ARTICLE BY LEO PERLMAN.
A new report shows exactly what Palestinian children are being taught. The silence from much of the West shows exactly what we’ve chosen to ignore.
Some stories stay with you, some demand to be told, and some matter because of what they mean for the children who will inherit whatever world we leave behind. That, ultimately, is what all of this comes down to.
I want peace — real, lasting peace — for Palestinian children and Israeli children, Muslim and Jewish. Not theoretical peace, not performative peace, not hashtag peace, but an actual peace that sees lives lived free of fear, classrooms without indoctrination, and futures without funerals.
But peace doesn’t come from wishing for it. Peace comes from telling the truth, even when the truth is the very thing nobody wants to confront.
And the truth is this: You cannot build peace while one side is teaching its children to hate, to murder, and to die. A new report shows exactly what Palestinian children are being taught. The silence from much of the West shows exactly what we’ve chosen to ignore.
Recently, the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education released a report on the Palestinian Authority’s textbooks. What it exposes isn’t an educational problem; it’s a generational crisis. A curriculum that “systematically violates UNESCO-derived standards.” A curriculum funded by Western nations, including Britain, despite promises and pledges that it would be reformed. A curriculum that teaches antisemitism, glorifies jihad, and prepares children not for life, but for martyrdom.
Marcus Sheff, the Institute’s CEO, described the findings as a “stark and disturbing reality.” He went on to say that, “Virulent antisemitism, the glorification of jihad and incitement to violence remain deeply embedded across all grades … There is no halt in sight.” He’s right, but the details somehow make even that feel like an understatement.
The Palestinian Authority curriculum is taught in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, including in UNRWA-run schools. (UNRWA is the UN agency exclusively for Palestinians.) UNRWA alone provides education to some 545,000 children in its schools. UNRWA’s commissioner general testified before the European Parliament in 2021, acknowledging that antisemitism and glorification of terrorism do indeed exist in Palestinian Authority textbooks.
In July 2024, the Palestinian Authority signed a Letter of Intent with the European Union, committing to curriculum reform and the removal of inciting content to align with UNESCO standards of peace and tolerance. Despite receiving over 380 million euros from the European Union, funding that was intended to be conditional on meaningful reforms, the Palestinian Authority has used this support to sustain and deepen incitement rather than eliminate it.
In Gaza, despite the destruction, suffering, and loss endured by its population since the Hamas-led massacre and kidnappings on October 7, 2023, “the education system remains a tool for cultivating future generations steeped in violence rather than a bridge toward reconciliation. The continued prioritization of incitement over education not only betrays the commitments the Palestinian Authority made to international donors but also ensures that the cycle of conflict will persist, fueled by an education system designed to radicalize rather than educate,” according to the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education’s report.
To grasp the scale of this crisis, you have to follow the curriculum the way a Palestinian child does, from their first attempts at reading to their final year of school. What emerges is not education but a ladder of indoctrination, each year building on the last, each lesson pushing them further from peace and closer to martyrdom as their imagined destiny.
It begins at just 6 or 7 years old, when one of their earliest vocabulary words is šahīd — martyr. Not “apple,” not “friend,” but martyr. Death, introduced before literacy itself.
By age 7 or 8, they are reciting poems urging them to “give [their] lives to the revolution” and “carry its flame” to Haifa, Jaffa, and Al-Aqsa. They are told that they are “lion cubs” destined to fight and die. While children elsewhere learn simple stories, Palestinian pupils learn the jihadist romance of sacrifice.
By 10, they are colouring in a Palestinian flag dripping with blood beside a map that erases Israel. They are told they must “protect Al-Aqsa” and that one day they will raise that bloodied flag over Jerusalem. This is not schooling; it is symbolic militarisation.
A fourth-grade math exercise asks students to calculate the number of martyrs (including those who have led suicide bombings on buses and shopping centers) in Palestinian uprisings accompanied by a photograph of raised coffins at a mass funeral. In grade 6, teachers are instructed to teach students that “The Zionists are the terrorists of the modern age, and they are fated to disappear.” Newton’s Second Law is exemplified by an image of a masked Palestinian boy aiming a slingshot at approaching soldiers, and students are asked, “What are the forces that influence the object after its release from the slingshot and the spring?”
By 12, they are taught to venerate Dalal Al-Mughrabi, who led the massacre of 38 Israelis including 13 children, after Palestinian terrorists hijacked a bus on the Coastal Highway of Israel and murdered its occupants in 1978. Al-Mughrabi’s “heroism” is immortalised; a mass murderer becomes a role model. At the same age, Jews are described as “terrorists of the modern age,” an eliminationist worldview presented as fact.
By 13, teachers recount invented atrocities of Israelis “bashing children’s heads” and mutilating women for jewellery, and students are told to draw the scenes. While British pupils sketch fruit bowls, Palestinian pupils sketch fantasies of Jewish barbarism.
By 14, reading comprehension consists of suicide bombers wearing explosive belts, knives slashing Israeli throats, and burned Israeli bodies — material students are told “not to forget.” This is not memory; it is psychological conditioning.
And by 17, the message becomes explicit. Violent jihad is taught as “the highest peak of Islam,” rewarded with paradise. Students are asked when jihad becomes a personal obligation and urged to return to Israeli cities “with a weapon in your hand.” By this age, the path laid out for them since Grade 1 is complete.
And yet, the rot runs deeper:
Antisemitic grading instructions tell teachers to deduct grading points from students who fail to tie the perpetration of Zionist massacres to Jewish religious thought.
Teachers are instructed to ask students, “Why do the Jews perpetrate massacres?”
Students are taught that those who die as martyrs fighting infidels (Christians, Jews, polytheists) will go to paradise where Allah will raise their status.
Jihad “for the liberation of Palestine” is presented as a “private obligation for every Muslim.”
Palestinian girls are encouraged to kill, be killed, and send their children to die, and they are told that the first woman who was martyred in the name of Islam was a woman who stabbed a Jew to death.
What becomes unmistakable, when you look at the curriculum as a whole, is that none of this is accidental. The indoctrination is sequential, it is cumulative, it is intentional.
From the moment they can read, Palestinian children are taught the vocabulary of death. By early primary school, they are introduced to the romance of revolution. By late primary, they are shown blood and maps without Israel. By middle school, they are absorbing graphic fantasies and drawing imagined Jewish barbarity. And by their mid-teens, they are told outright that jihad may be their personal duty, that martyrdom is not only valid but exalted.
By the time they reach early adolescence, many have been guided, step by step, year by year, to believe that their greatest life ambition is to die. This is not a curriculum; it is a conveyor belt, a production line of hate. It is a system designed to ensure that the next generation cannot imagine peace, only sacrifice, violence, and the glorification of their own destruction.
But here’s the real scandal: Where is everyone?
Where are all the self-appointed moral guardians who fill our streets, our screens, and our institutions with their lectures on justice and liberation?
Where is Ben Jamal, director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, so tireless when it comes to accusing Israel of every crime under the sun, yet suddenly mute when faced with documented child indoctrination? Where is Huda Ammori and Palestine Action, forever eager to vandalise buildings in London but apparently uninterested in confronting the psychological vandalism of Palestinian children?
Where is Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party, so quick to moralise, so quick to hashtag, so strangely silent now? Where is Jeremy Corbyn, who had time to run phone banks for a New York candidate celebrated by antisemites, but has no time to condemn a curriculum that teaches children to slit Jewish throats?
Where is Zarah Sultana, whose lapel badge demanding the eradication of the world’s only Jewish state is always perfectly positioned for the cameras, but who cannot muster a single breath to criticise the Palestinian Authority and Hamas for poisoning an entire generation?
Where are the rest of the UK politicians, those who love to posture, to grandstand, to condemn Zionism with operatic fervour, yet fall silent when the story involves Palestinian leaders harming Palestinian children?
And beyond Britain: Where are the tireless performers in Hollywood’s genre of performative morality? Where are all those so quick to sign letters accusing Israel of genocide? Those so eager to boycott Israelis but strangely unwilling to speak out when Palestinian kids are being primed for martyrdom?
Where are all the influencers, actors, journalists, and cos players, who tripped over themselves to denounce Israel, to shame Jews across the industries, to declare their righteous solidarity? Where is that energy now? Where is that courage? Where is that moral clarity?
Or does child indoctrination not generate enough likes on Instagram?
Here’s the real question they cannot escape: Is this treatment of Palestinian children, this abuse, this indoctrination, this theft of their futures, something they would ever accept for their own?
Of course not. They would be rightly outraged, they would be on television within hours, posting on social media, demanding resignations, inquiries, government action. They hold their own children to a standard of safety, dignity, and innocence that they happily deny to Palestinian children. And that double-standard is the most revealing and shameful part of all this.
Because, if you will not fight for Palestinian children to receive the same protection, the same education, the same basic moral decency you expect for your own, then you are not an ally of the Palestinian people. You are an enabler of their suffering.
I opened with children because they are the beginning of this story and the victims of its ending. My children will not inherit my silence and Palestinian children should not inherit their leaders’ hatred.
But when you read what the Palestinian Authority is teaching the next generation, one thing becomes impossible to deny: They hate my children more than they love their own, and much of the West has become their enabler.
The politicians who won’t speak, the activists who won’t look, the celebrities who denounce Israel while ignoring the indoctrination of Palestinian children, they are part of the problem, and there will be no peace until this ends. Peace cannot grow in classrooms where death is taught as destiny. By Leo Perlman, Feb. 4
I guess the Spanish Inquisition didn’t torture and kill enough Jews for Spain. They want more Jewish blood to be spilled. There is never enough dead Jews for Spain. And their Catholic Church is silent, as usual. Sanction Spain and all things from this miserable country.